Graduates, as you begin your next chapter, remember that one of the most important contributions you can make is to your community. More than 5,000 of you are about to take your first steps into a future filled with both uncertainty and opportunity, and I know you are prepared to face that uncertainty and seize those opportunities because of the strong and compassionate Hawkeye community you’ve come from.

Now, as you find yourself taking on a new job or moving to a new city, the important thing is that you anchor yourself in a community, one that will support you and that you can give back to. Giving back is where you can have an enormous impact on the future, much more than you might imagine.

Our world, and the young people who will mold it in the coming years, need community now more than ever. We are more interconnected and interdependent than in any previous era. And as more voices join the global conversation, as communities expand and fracture and recombine, becoming more diverse in thought, members of those communities become even more reliant on one another to be supportive, respectful, compassionate, and innovative in their approaches to our common problems.

Help your new community engage in robust and respectful dialogue. Ideas must be challenged, norms must be questioned, and we must all be willing to be uncomfortable in order to move forward. If we are to create a world that ensures equity, inclusion, and opportunity, the most important thing to do is to have a local impact—the best place to start making the world better is right at home, wherever that happens to be for you. You’ve learned how to do that at Iowa, your home away from home, and I encourage you to take your experience as a Hawkeye and use it to improve the lives of all the people you come into contact with.

At Iowa you had the opportunity to impact a community with your voice, your passion, and your ideas. You must find a way to ensure these attributes do not fade as you move to the next community in your life. The whole world is counting on you to do so.

But the world is a big place, so start by solving the problems you see right where you are. With 5,000 of you embarking on that mission, a whole lot of local problems will get solved. And when a lot of local problems gets solved, that pretty quickly adds up to global problems getting solved.